> In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend.
But, ease of communication and parsing ideas has certainly advanced every scientific field. So, ignoring the communication component of peer review process (the fact that peer review is part of a somewhat standardized system of communication of scientific ideas)... perhaps the validation component has just never had the right culture to shine in.
In the current era of fact-checking and trust decay (getting worse all the time, ref AI generated content), perhaps we are at a stage where the importance of validation is at an all time high, compared to the importance of efficient communication?
> When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor’s words, “a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.”
While fraud is certainly possible, it's far more likely that it's just academics following incentives.
Difficult to acquire data is a moat that others can't breach. There is no way in hell any scientist fighting inside the "publish-or-perish" paradigm is going to cough up one of their few advantages.
But, ease of communication and parsing ideas has certainly advanced every scientific field. So, ignoring the communication component of peer review process (the fact that peer review is part of a somewhat standardized system of communication of scientific ideas)... perhaps the validation component has just never had the right culture to shine in.
In the current era of fact-checking and trust decay (getting worse all the time, ref AI generated content), perhaps we are at a stage where the importance of validation is at an all time high, compared to the importance of efficient communication?